Two Years Later. OXBOW? Still Dead.

Miles Davis, name in the press a lot this week because of milestones connected to his artistic contributions and birth and such, said to some typically confused journo back in the 1960s that music was his constant companion.

Like some people processed language he could claim that it’s physical presence occupied the room just as surely as did oxygen. Or the interviewer’s own face. The subtext here, always it seems, when an Anglo journo is trying to Tarzan their way into understanding the dark climes of the Black creation of art, is the mythification of the Black experience.

But Miles is just talking about music. That which you can hear with your ears. And that, which if you’re lucky enough, you can make.

So beyond the “oooo” and “ahhh” moments it’s just all very simple.

“What is that you’re humming?” My kid asked me.

Well, you know, old guys start doing old stuff and on this occasion I’d been humming some…driftwood. Just a piece of a song. So familiar, but even I couldn’t place it. So badly couldn’t place it that it started to drive me nuts. Until it came to me.

It was an OXBOW song.

Came to me with a mix of horror, actually. Since me quitting the band that I started (and still legally own) in the late 1980s, in a swelter of sadness, shock and confusion, I’d blacked it out. All of it. Outside of occasional texts or emails from former bandmates and other musos, I’d successfully managed to tear off the almost 40 years of OXBOW bandaging and just not think about it.

The move out of America helped. The move back to America with BUNUEL a few months later was weird and weirdly disorienting. Never more so than when we played at San Francisco’s Bottom of the Hill. A great venue, closing this year in a city that’s long ceased giving major fucks about live music and/or hipsters who are NOT millionaires, it was where OXBOW played many a time prior.

Looking out into the audience at one point I spied Dan Adams and Greg Davis, and I thought my heart was going to explode. I’ve known Greg since 1985. I’d known of Dan since 1983. I’d played, by our estimation, hundreds of shows with them. Attended their weddings. Officiated at Greg’s. They’ve attended and helped during the birth of at least one, or two of my kids. Deaths. Divorces. Forty years has seen a lot.

If ever I were to have brothers these would be them. And there they were just watching. Listening.

But the musical elephant in the room? IT ALL.

Let me explain a bit first though…had OXBOW concluded after Love’s Holiday, our last release? There’d have been a hermetic perfection to that. With eight records over 40 years, none of them, honestly, ever less than a critical success (though more often than not financial failures), with the possible exception of what we could call OXBOW’s Muru Muru, that would be the Anthony Fantano-blasted Love’s Holiday, we’d have been fine.

That’s not what happened though. What happened is that we finished recording Follow Me Now In Merry Measure. In an ideal world this…explainer…would have somehow been bundled or packaged with Love’s Holiday. Not a double album but a spiritual heir and a necessary companion volume recorded at approximately the same time.

In my thinking its absence make Love’s Holiday harder to understand, and now it’s presence creates a sentence without end. And no one likes lousy endings even in the midst of a lousy ending.

Of course on a parallel path something else wonderful is happening: bands in vaguely similar circumstances are managing to snatch from defeat…victories.

NEUROSIS for one. Similarly dismasted by a band member who had made a solo decision about that which affected the entire collective, they were, after a period of time as long as OXBOW’s, done. And then? They were not.

Mastodon, in situations much more crucial, attendant by a death of a founder, just announced more shows. Some couched as “tributes” to the passing member who, at the time of his accidental death, was calling them all assholes if I remember correctly.

So, there IS life after death.

But the alchemy behind OXBOW is a different thing I think.

“Hey man,” it was a text. Middle of the night. “There’s a guitarist kid in LA,” the writer goes on as I read his text bedside where it woke me up. “Who can play 60 OXBOW songs.”

My great-grandmother had some saying that amounted to “one monkey don’t stop no show” and so in the blear-eyed early morning wake up, an idea had started to form. What a band does live though, different from what they do on record, is move ahead or not.

NEUROSIS has moved ahead in a compelling way that both burnishes the brand and advances the canon. Not always possible, or in the case of OXBOW desirable. Words like “tension” often appear in critical discussion of OXBOW’s musical oeuvre but it seems to me this is just lazy.

There is not tension as much as it is a purposeful turn away from that which might…sell? Our only compass directional has been what feels both good and necessary in detailing in the dictates of our souls. How does that match up against being to “play” the songs?

Beyond that though the most major of issues is not how to explain all of this in a live setting but to create a context where selling the next record to complete la commedia is the right thing to do.

With the never-ending cloud of the accusations that scuttled my near and dear association with that which I loved still in the air, could I honestly ask a record label to take a flyer on it? Could I ask that of a public relations company, a booking agent, venues, venue staff, an audience, artists for cover art?

I don’t think I could but I could most certainly feel beyond a shadow of a doubt that this record MUST be heard. And options to do so don’t even seem scant.

Isn’t this what Bandcamp was created for? Give the record away for free. The $75,000 in debt, or thereabouts, that OXBOW still has left on the books (and this doesn’t even come close to touching what was lost when we were kicked off of the remainder of the Mr. Bungle shows, rebooked flights and hotels), is of little consequence at this point.

It is money we will never, ever see again anyway. But we suspected as much when we spent it. That’s not why we spent it but labels in their eternal craziness are still the best places to park your art if you have any hope of selling it but if you want it to be good and like the sounds in your head this is realistically what needs to be spent.

If it is posted on Bandcamp, sans artwork, audiences who believed it worthy could pay. Or not. In any case the gain would be theirs. And ours. The loss? What we never expected to regain in the first place.

OR…is there another way to go? I don’t know. I don’t.

Though this morning dropping my almost-six-year-old daughter off at school, a teacher I have known all year starts stuttering as she runs off to class.

“Hey, uh…” He’s never looked at me. Not in the eyes really.

“Yes…?”

“Hey…” and then in one solid blurt, “…OXBOW…”

And I laugh. He was singing at a school event, I had noted he had a good voice and had mentioned to my kid that she should tell him I sing too. She did.

Turns out he’s a big fan/listener. Knew the songs. The records. Mentioned Mr. Bungle. Mentioned BUNUEL. I was thinking of BUNUEL when I told him as I left that I’d bring him some new music on pick up.

But this is not what I’m thinking now. Or rather that, and more.

Or in the fullness of this meditation that has no expected end, a final question: as far as mortal or venial sins go, is not releasing the record in any form at all serving a wider purpose of any kind?

Hmmm…well…you tell me.

PLUS….if books are still your thing and you still do books, please do this one…the memoir A Walk Across Dirty Water and Straight Into Murderer’s Row, from Amazon…Or the Bookshop.Org dealie: Here?

And if you’d like to book a book show? Please DM.